


You Got It Made (With the Guy in Shades)

by jukeboxhound



Series: Perspective & Opinion [2]
Category: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy XIII
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Genderfluid Character, Hipster!Squall, Humor, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-02-08 11:43:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1939764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jukeboxhound/pseuds/jukeboxhound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People who can hold coherent conversations about feelings with the titles of songs from the 80s and 90s  deserve their own level in hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Got It Made (With the Guy in Shades)

...

By the time Squall walks into Starbucks, holding himself upright by sheer force of will and hoping that extended human interaction will be a hell reserved for someone else, Lightning and Cloud are already sitting at their usual table.  He seriously considers turning around and walking out before they see him, but the smell of fresh coffee has already triggered his Pavlovian reflex and all he can think about is a dark roast as bitter as the barista can legally make it.

“Hey, Corey Hart,” says Lightning.  Squall sets down his cup with great dignity before slumping forward with his head in his arms, sunglasses digging into his biceps.

“You know what they say about the guy in shades,” Cloud chimes in with a straight face.

“Don’t switch the blade on him?”

“Don’t masquerade on him.”

“I hate you both,” Squall mumbles into the table.  “So much.”

“Hit me with your best shot,” Lightning says, and when Cloud adds, “Take on me,” Squall can practically hear the smirks that would be shit-eating grins on anyone else.  There’s the gentle scraping sound of Lightning picking up her own coffee and she continues, “How was your night with Seifer?”

Squall lifts his head just enough to glare a question at her over the top of the sunglasses.  He immediately regrets it when the afternoon light coming in through the adjacent window hits his eyes.

“You’re only ever hungover after you’ve been with him,” she explains.

“Fuck off,” he mutters.

“That bad?” says Cloud, not unsympathetically.  She’s absently twirling a straightened length of chocobo-yellow hair around a finger and contemplating what looks like the engineering plans to a fucking airship in a battered notebook on the table.  Her lavender silk dress looks a little incongruous against the heavy, silver wolf earring she usually wears.

“ _Die_ ,” Squall replies, and Lightning shrugs, says, “Girls just wanna have fun, Squall.”

Clear gloss makes Cloud’s renewed smirk especially obvious and therefore obnoxious.  “Hard to say I’m sorry.”

Squall thumps his head one the table once and immediately decides not to do that again.

“I’d thought you two weren’t talking, though,” Lightning says more seriously.  Not that it’s any of her business.

“We’re not.”

“To be fair, they might not have been doing much talking at all,” Cloud volunteers, quite unnecessarily.

But Cloud isn’t actually wrong, is she; Seifer just has to live a few doors down from Squall in the dorms, just has to have the habit of going to the gym during the peak hours after dinner (the better for people to admire the drops of sweat sliding down the grooves of his hard muscle), just has to know that Squall’s roommate tends to spend so much time hiding in other people’s rooms that Squall is usually alone.  It was ten o’clock and the conversation hadn’t gotten much further than, “Hey, that test in Professor Trepe’s class is coming up, we should study, _yes_ , Princess, I can only study when I’m not wearing a shirt,” before Squall was unceremoniously picked up and his back was against the wall, bare thighs spread on either side of Seifer’s hips and those shirtless abs pressing in interesting ways against his dick.  And, of course, Seifer just has to know about the bottle of vodka kept for emergencies stashed in the bottom drawer of his desk.

“Beat it,” Squall can’t help growling despite himself.

"So how did you end up in the meadow?”

 Squall has to sit up properly so he can peer suspiciously at Lightning.  “What?”

 She flicks a finger at his hair with a dry, “You’ve got some grass stuck in there,” and he has to resist the urge to run his hands through his hair.  He vaguely remembers stumbling out of his room at some point long after dark, Seifer just a few steps behind and pawing at his naked skin, one of them wearing the shameful badge of socks, sandals, and nothing else.  Squall’s dorm is at the end of a building closest to the enormous field sprawling out behind one of the colleges, its expanse broken up by lines of thorny bushes and the distant campus lights keeping the night hours from being too dark.  It hadn’t been hard to avoid the smattering of stoners lounging around debating the artistic merits of a man who puts his name on a urinal.  Dry grass crackled under their feet as Squall and Seifer stumbled towards a distant spot away from voyeurs or common sense.

The vodka bottle made a soft thump when it hit the ground, knocked out of Squall’s hand when Seifer tackled him.  The dry grass, still warm from a long hot day, had poked delicate skin in places that dry grass had no business poking, but Seifer’s body had been such a hot, delicious weight on top of his own that Squall gave absolutely no shits.  The pleasantly cool air and the crackle of grass and harsh panting turned into a watercolor of skin salty with sweat and _touch me, you idiot, I want your hand on my cock right now or I swear to Hyne --_

“Is that a blush?” Lightning asks in utter fascination, and Squall lets his head thump back down to the table with a groan.

“Opposites attract,” Cloud says with just enough singsong in her voice that Squall debates whether or not breaking her nose would be worth Sephiroth, Aeris, and Zack’s collective retribution, and Lightning actually pats his arm with, “Love takes time.”

“You are going to die,” Squall tells the table.  He hears Lightning get up with a squeak of her chair and move away, leaving him alone with Cloud and the admittedly pleasant scent of her light, citrus-y perfume or whatever it is.  There are a few moments of silence.

“If you’re going to say it, then fucking it.”

“Must’ve been an escapade,” Cloud says promptly.  

Squall doesn’t even bother twitching.  Another quiet moment or two in which Squall can faintly hear Lightning’s voice up at the counter, and then Cloud says hesitantly, “I did a lot of stupid shit when I came back from...when I came back.  Sephiroth and I, we...it wasn’t easy.  Still isn’t, but I mean...it took a long time for me to stop, uh, running.”

‘Emotions,’ croons Squall’s traitorous mind, which is exactly the kind of conversational subject he actively tries to avoid.  But the times that Cloud talks about her military service are so few and far between that even Squall can’t bring himself to be enough of an asshole to tell her to shut up.

“I just mean that whatever’s going on between you two, it isn’t worth dragging out.  You’re doing the opposite of protecting yourself.”

“We don’t want the same thing,” Squall mutters.  Cloud sips her drink - peppermint tea, by the smell of it - and looks at him with that uncomfortably intense stare of hers that Squall’s sunglasses completely fail to block.

“Don’t you?”

A month ago Squall had come back to his dorm from a study session with Seifer in the library - he still isn’t sure if it was a study session or actually an extended argument - and slung his bag on his bed.  When his bag tipped over, the books inside had slid out, including one of Seifer’s he had grabbed by mistake.  It had several battered Post-Its sticking out its side, and when he flipped open its plain cover to a random Post-It he’d found one of Shakespeare’s love sonnets and part of the lyrics to “Behind Blue Eyes” scribbled in the margin in Seifer’s spiky hand.  His breath hitched with what could’ve equally been dread or hope.

“No,” he says decisively, sitting up and taking off his sunglasses to dump them on the table just as Lightning returns with a poisonously black coffee in her hand that she puts down in front of him.

“You’re welcome,” she says.

“He’s an idiot,” Cloud tells her.  Lightning looks at Squall and the tension turning his knuckles pale, at Cloud and the lines of stress that never really smoothed out around her eyes, at the cheap metal ring from a pizza parlor’s vending machine on her own little finger.

“Ha, well, guess we all are.”

**Author's Note:**

> Song list: Corey Hart, “Sunglasses at Night”; Pat Benetar, “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”; Ah-Ha, “Take on Me”; Cindi Lauper, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”; Michael Jackson, “Beat It”; Chicago, “Hard to Say I’m Sorry”; Paula Abdul, “Opposites Attract”; Mariah Carey, “Love Takes Time” and “Emotions”; Janet Jackson, “Escapade”; The Who, “Behind Blue Eyes.”


End file.
